It’s taken more than six years after the beginning of the last financial crisis for the US to finally implement some of the regulations that became glaringly necessary when the financial system began to implode at that time. The Volcker Rule, along with Dodd-Frank legislation, are a start towards the kind of systemic regulation the financial system here requires to keep it in line.

Unfortunately, the regulations are too limited in scope to keep problems in the U.S. from reaching crisis proportions, let alone spreading overseas. As Gordon Brown points out in an Op-Ed in the New York Times, the lack of regulations to restrain global financial corporations operating overseas and markets in the developed and developing world all but ensures that we will visit Global Financial Crisis 2.0.

I wrote about this more than four years ago for the New York Society of Security Analysts in a piece entitled Mending the Seams: International Regulatory Reform. In the intervening years, a few things have changed, but not much. On a global basis, rules governing everything from systemic risk to derivatives to accounting standards to hedge funds vary widely as does enforcement of those rules.

Even if the rules were consistent, financial services companies can escape regulation by moving certain operations to different jurisdictions. There’s still the propensity of the right hand to have no clue what the left hand is doing, as alleged “rouge” traders engage in mind bogglingly risky behavior.

What is the scariest is the risks that we don’t even know about. The last crisis proved that the lack of foresight into risky activities was endemic, from the ones that seemed, in hindsight to be the most obvious, to other obscure risks that few even comprehended were risky.

If Bank of England economist David Miles is right, the next financial crisis will happen sooner than we think. He predicts one every seven years. It could happen, or not. The system could stumble along for another few years, fueled by loose money and a return to economic growth.

While the developed world and the global economy may be growing at a higher rate, one thing that hasn’t really changed is the lack of global stability. And that’s what’s going to come back to haunt us.